37 ms·

Google clamps down on free storage

167 points by premk 7y ago

ghaff 7y ago
I was noticing just the other day that my Gmail storage is creeping upward towards its limit. I'm sure it could stand some cleaning out although I'm not sure how much that will affect the storage used. It's also harder if you've been in the Apple ecosystem for a while with getting off with the free tier of storage. I suspect a lot of us are going to end up paying various subscription fees for storage on a number of services we use.
- kyrra 7y ago
  https://www.google.com/settings/storage https://www.google.com/settings/storage can be at least a little helpful to see storage usage across Google's main properties.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    That was actually quite useful. I apparently have 4GB of pics on Google Photo that I didn't know about or use.
- jvagner 7y ago
  I was surprised at how difficult it was to make "Delete" a top-level, default UI option even in the latest iOS version of Mail. It seemed interesting and novel when Gmail first launched and they encouraged archiving everything, but all these years later, mail clients are still engineered around this notion, even when they're not Gmail-only mail clients. I like to delete emails, and for me, on iOS, that means I tend to use either Outlook or Spark (between iPhone and iPad), or.. ironically, Gmail for iOS, which allows for a one-swipe-action committed delete.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I've gotten pretty lazy about deleting emails. But, the space aside, GBs of random stuff do make it harder to search for older emails and docs, especially if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for.
  - jchw 7y ago
    The opposite problem also exists: I am a bit frustrated trying to archive mail in Yandex Mail on iOS, which actually pushes you to delete and hides archive behind a couple layers. Not sure why, to be honest.
- GistNoesis 7y ago
  What I usually do is search mails according to specific criterion, put a label on all of them so that they are easily downloadable from https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout (you can sub-select only the specified label there) Then a few hours later I receive the download link and download them. Then search for the label and delete them all to release the space. Don't use the existing archive functionality, because you won't be able to delete them all ; by doing a "in:archive" search the div which propose to really select them all won't pop-up (feature or dark-pattern I don't know).
- digitalsushi 7y ago
  I did too, and so I tried to find a way to back my gmail up. With their rate limiting, I'm not convinced my gmail is something I can actually retrieve. It's 2/3 full and too heavy to pick up, the handles break off. And with 200k emails from 1999 (I think I have emails before gmail in there), I'm in trouble.
bpodgursky 7y ago
It will be healthy for both Google and the internet at large for Google to have a revenue stream diversified from advertising. If consumers feel that it is normal to pay small amounts of money for useful web-based services, Google and other sites will have better and more transparent opportunities to monetize.
- ShteiLoups 7y ago
  So long as they don't continue to sell my data while also taking my money, peace.
hastes 7y ago
I would be more than happy to pay for gmail, google docs, and an entire suite of google products with the absolute guarantee legally that they could not and would not either collect, or sell my information as part of that payment. I highly doubt that would ever happen though, considering data is the new oil. Oh well, one can dream.
- nostromo 7y ago
  That exists. Sign up for GSuite for a single seat.
  - thekingshorses 7y ago
    How much does it cost?
    - klodolph 7y ago
      $6/month per user. I switched from an email server I personally managed (exim+dovecot) to GSuite a couple years ago.
    - crazygringo 7y ago
      $12/mo for 1 TB of storage: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html If storage isn't a concern (just privacy), $6/mo for 30 GB (double what Gmail gives you for free).
      - dimensi0nal 7y ago
        The $12 plan is unlimited; the 1 TB limit isn't enforced.
        judge2020 7y ago
        Do you have a source or have other info on this? I have a G Suite Non-Profit account and while it says the "my drive" had 30 GB of storage, the non-profit license also grants us "shared drives" which grant unlimited storage but only in those shared drives. I was wondering if the 1 TB limit is a similar situation. As a side-note, Drive File Stream messes up uploading big files/folders due to this: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en
xiphias2 7y ago
I'm happy to pay to Google, but I would be happy if in return it would stop mining my emails. Still, I know that it's too much to ask for.
- thesandlord 7y ago
  Gmail stopped reading emails a while back: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
  - zajd 7y ago
    "to show you ads", what exactly that means is beyond me. They obviously scan your emails, as there are a ton of features that require it, things like recognizing when a flight is upcoming, etc. If you trust them not to use that for advertising I have some valuable beachfront real estate to sell you. Remember Twitter/FB's 'oops, we were accidentally using the recovery number incorrectly', Google essentially just leaves that door open via the language used in this answer. Without a definition of "for advertising" it's just meaningless.
  - rurp 7y ago
    "Google does not read your emails for the purpose of directly targeting ads" is a wildly different and much more accurate statement than "Gmail stopped reading your emails".
- mattzito 7y ago
  Google does not mine your emails. https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/ensuring-your-security-and-privacy-within-gmail/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/ensuring-... Disclosure: I work for google on G Suite, but not on Gmail.
  - mfer 7y ago
    > We do not process email content to serve ads This says nothing about email metadata being used in relation to ads or for uses of content unrelated to ads (e.g., generation of search results). If I hadn't seen the leaked selfish ledger video [1] I would not look for these nuances in the language. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
The problem with Gmail is that it lacks basic cleanup tools such as sorting by size and you are forced to waste your time with tricks like larger:20mb.
- ahnick 7y ago
  Had no idea you could do that. Thanks!
- stvswn 7y ago
  what's hard about that? When you are approaching your limit they give you a warning and link to this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6374270?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6374270?hl=en
- ssully 7y ago
  The bigger problem with GMail is that the mobile app has no controls to manage large amount of emails - not even a basic 'select all'. Which is hilarious, because Inbox was so good because it was easy to manage most of your email on your phone. Now my Gmail is overflowing because it's too difficult to archive thing I want, or delete what I don't in bulk. I actually have to log into the web interface to do any kind of clean up, which is something I never had to do with Inbox.
  - ridiculous_fish 7y ago
    It is possible to select more emails than are displayed; however operations such as deletion on large selections always fail.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Just use a proper desktop client. Gmail's IMAP implementation was pretty non-standard last time I checked but it should be good enough for this.
im3w1l 7y ago
Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into monetization mode? A sign of slowing growth and increased payout to shareholders to come?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into monetization mode? No, that happened when they started selling ads.
cocoa19 7y ago
It would be nice to take your email address to another provider, the same way it happens for cellphone numbers. This could be email 2.0... First rule: 1)Do not require host name in the field name. johndoe@gmail.com becomes johndoe.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  So who owns the username? Who runs the domain? The beauty of email as protocol is that its independent. Nothing is stopping you from running you @cocoa19.com (given its non-occupied already).
  - cocoa19 7y ago
    Who owns the telephone number? Same concept. If I don't want Google to run my email, I just switch providers, let's say protonmail or fastmail, etc. But I don't have to give a new address to all my acquaintances.
    - me_me_me 7y ago
      Government owns the prefix that is rented to businesses who wants to start their phone company (well at least in Europe). Also the prefix in the phone number is exactly like a domain. Even if there were no prefixes, one way or another you need a governing body that ensures no clashes occur and has power to decide on disputes. So no two companies try to assign same number to two different customers.
- PureParadigm 7y ago
  You can buy your own domain. Then when you switch email providers you'd just change your domain's mail records to point to the new provider. You can even transfer your domain between registrars if you decide you don't like your current one.
ipsi 7y ago
Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3, for example, or about what you'd pay for S3 glacier storage, not including transfer costs. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is about the same price as iCloud, but also charges for downloads. Since Backblaze is profitable (as far as I know?), presumably Apple are making money off iCloud storage, but I'm still not sure if I'd use the word "lucrative" here.
- gruez 7y ago
  >Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3 ...assuming you use exactly that much. If you use something like 250GB, it's twice the price as s3. If you check the offerings[1], there's a gap in the 200GB-2TB range. I suspect that's to force "average users" (in the 200GB-1TB range) into paying more than they need, while giving the appearance of being competitive (if you use all 2TB, which most won't). [1] 50GB: $0.99 200GB: $2.99 2TB: $9.99
  - shantly 7y ago
    The funny thing about consumer cloud storage is it's only useful if you aren't using all of it. Stuff just automatically showing up there is the point. If it's full, that doesn't happen.
wccrawford 7y ago
When GMail started, they claimed that I'd never need to delete emails and I could always just archive them. I knew that claim was too good to be true, but I figured it'd be a long time before I really needed to worry about it. Drive now exists and takes up more of that space, but I'm still comfortably away from my limits. I'm not upset about eventually having to pay for storage, but I was and am upset about their claim that it would never be necessary.
- thrill 7y ago
  All promises of perpetuity have sell by dates.
- decasteve 7y ago
  This has become the pattern. Buying into something on the basis of a value proposition only to have it consistently changed from under you without any recourse. It's a bait-and-switch and that's why it's upsetting. It's perfectly reasonable to charge for these services and what they are suggesting to charge -- if I were still a Google customer. But that's not how it was sold to everyone. How many competitors did they drive out by taking this approach and undercutting this way for so long?
  - psanford 7y ago
    There's no bait-and-switch going on here! They've always been perfectly clear in how much storage you get for free. They've never reduced that amount, they have only increased it over time.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    That's unfair with respect to email. I've had large corporate email environments in my portfolio for about half of my career. As recently as 2017, ~2-3% of a 200k org of those users would exceed the free GMail tier in terms of storage. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I'd put money on 80% of the userbase being less than 10GB. Big email users are always using email as a filing system. Calling GMail bait-and-switch based on marketing claims made in a 2005 context is a pretty extreme stance. My team at a big enteprise org provided folks with 50-100MB (similar to pre-GMail online offerings) in 2005. Then Google offered a seemingly limitless service that is to this day practically unlimited for all but the most active user.
linsomniac 7y ago
This article seems awfully doom and gloom. I find that: - Google provides really good tools for archiving your data. If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, archive it somewhere else, and then clean up items you no longer want. I recently did this with my photos, I knew I had some huge videos that had been uploaded that I didn't need (I had edited them into a Youtube video), so I was able to find and delete them and open up quite a bit of space. I toyed with the idea of deleting photos 5 years old, once I archived them, but I didn't need to because of the above. - Google provides a lot of value to me for the $3/month I've been spending. Photo enrichment and searching is something I use all the time. Storage of my documents and files is very useful and google has been super reliable.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  > If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, This is what I'm doing to migrate my data over to Microsoft's offering (I get adfree mail and 1TB + office products that work offline). I'm just waiting for Microsoft to let me use a domain without GoDaddy, so I can use the email, but I'm more likely to use it for storage.
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  Hah. Takeout is neat, but it doesn’t seem to include any of the ad tracking data google have on me. Emails, videos, files: yes. URLs I’ve been tracked to that influence which ads I’m served: nope. I recently found it easier to find an old music video I’d made by using takeout to download my YouTube archive, rather than figuring out which sub identity of which linked account I had used to upload the private video.
  - knorker 7y ago
    Presumably that's because that's not your data. I mean nothing good or bad about that. But why would you expect to be able to download data that's not yours?
- jfoster 7y ago
  Exactly! Suppose you live for another 100 years. At the current rate, Google will be giving you the rest of your life with this for $300. You should just be hoping it remains this cheap.
kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
I'm an idiot. Like, hardcore. This morning I made breakfast and left for work without eating it. Even I came to the realization that if you don't pay for something you are a disposable, interchangeable asset to be exploited. $4.25 per month gets me 25GB at Fastmail. $1.08 per month gets me a domain name at Namecheap. $5.33 per month gets me an email address with no ads and no tracking, support when things go wrong, and an email address that is my actual name at a .com address that sounds respectable. If fastmail goes bad? All of my emails are on my computer. I just switch providers and I can keep the same address. If namecheap goes bad? I move my domain name to another service. There are step-by-step easy-to-follow tutorials on how to do what I did that are so simple to implement that even someone who left their bowl of oatmeal on the kitchen counter this morning and is really hungry at work could follow them. If something isn't worth spending $5.33 per month on, is it really that important? I don't pay for HN. If they started screwing with their users, or started charging for the service I would move on and certainly wouldn't write articles claiming that YC hooked me then hung me out to dry for cash.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Custom domains aren't secure though, it's probably the most vulnerable and easiest point of attack
  - chenster 7y ago
    What is that?
    - gruez 7y ago
      Usually social engineering the domain registrar into transferring the domain.
      - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
        You can lock it though.
mfer 7y ago
There are many ways to look at this... 1. It is great that Google is working to come up income sources other than ads. This will help diversify their business and motives over time. 2. This may cause some to think that the money is the only method of payment for the service that's happening. That payment via our data isn't happening because money is involved. I hope this does not happen. 3. It opens the door for competitors who want to charge for a service. If Google can charge this gives some emotional motivation for others to do it instead of harvesting and selling data. It's a tiny thing and a bit part but still a thing. 4. This is telling that Google isn't making enough money on this data to justify storing more of it. What does this say about enough for them? How much data do people want to store and what would it mean? I'll stop at 4 things. I hope people wonder down these different paths that are not mutually exclusive.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  Given that search data is not very valuable after 3 months I suppose the other data is less valuable after the same time. This may prompt some users to help google out by deleting their old less valuable data when they get near their limits, or if not they may help Google out with some money for storing old data that otherwise is not valuable for Google.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
From the article: > “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one person tweeted in September. Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory. I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all these tweets to back it up!
- pacala 7y ago
  Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian: they can craft any narrative by choosing which tweets to show in your timeline. The ultimate out-of-context quoting machine. 140 character limits was set in place for a reason.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    > Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian not sure if gp's point has anything to do with twitter itself or character limits.
    - pacala 7y ago
      gp is complaining about third parties quoting tweets out of context. When Twitter's raison d'être is out of context quoting. He saw trees, I'm glad to point at the whole forest.
      - V-eHGsd_ 7y ago
        gp wasn't talking about tweets being taken out of context. they were talking about reporters using an entire tweet from a random person to support a random theory.
        pacala 7y ago
ineedasername 7y ago
I've found their prices very reasonable and worth the cost for roughly 50GB in business and family related photos, with a healthy margin left for growth in storage needs.
pbreit 7y ago
When did Gmail's ever-increasing storage allotment thing end?
- illnewsthat 7y ago
  From the article "It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped."
mkr-hn 7y ago
Short version: Google is offering paid plans for people who exceed the ample free 15GB of storage. There is so much to criticize Google for, but asking for money in exchange for a service is not one of them.
- sct202 7y ago
  Yeah weren't people complaining about how they've been suffocating a lot of industries (like mapping, email) by offering so much for free subsidized by search ads.
  - mkr-hn 7y ago
    There seem to be three broad generations--by adoption, weakly correlated with age--of internet-savvy people. 1: People who were very active in the BBS/Usenet days and saw the emergence of the public Internet and web. 2: People (like me) who mainly got on when the .com bubble was warming up. People in 1 and 2 saw or even had these complaints, and had plenty of skepticism about ad driven models when they emerged with the growing realization at Google and other surviving web companies that ads and data mining could save them after the crash. 3: People who only know the internet after that. Who never knew a time when the internet was such a big, new thing that people still capitalized the word. I think most of the people who complain about companies charging for stuff are in 3 and never knew what we lost when ad-funded silos pushed everything else out. It doesn't help that a lot of them are, along with 2 and even 1, struggling to make enough money to survive with so many jobs turned into SaaS or taken over by big outsourcing firms that don't need as many people.
magnetic 7y ago
I've been pretty happy with the following setup: I have a domain at namecheap, which forwards my address (say foo@bar.com) to my gmail account. I use fetchmail from my home computer to bring the gmail content to my local mail server (dovecot), which serves it out to me via imaps. That means there is usually very little sitting in gmail, and it can accumulate there for a while when I have to do maintenance on my home OpenBSD server (which is quite rare and doesn't last very long generally). That means I can keep my email address "forever" (it'll always stay foo@bar.com) but I can switch out of gmail anytime I want, as long as the provider I switch to allows POP. It also means I can take advantage of the spam filtering provided by gmail. I also take advantage of the "advanced parsing" they perform on my mail, but my default assumption is that anybody in the chain will be doing it anyways, so I have no illusions that switching out of gmail will help prevent any data mining.
6d6b73 7y ago
The problem here is not that Google started charging people for their services The problem here is not the question if Gmail is good or not. The problem is that they subsidized their Gmail and other services in order to get rid of small competitors and once they have a large market share, they will make most of their services paid. It will take time, it will be slow but it's going to happen. And they use their large market share to keep all of the small independent mail providers and self-hosted email servers in check by marking their emails as spam.
- svachalek 7y ago
  Yeah, this is basic capitalism but pretty scummy nonetheless. Having an email address for a decade makes it incredibly difficult to change. The one "bright" spot is actually that Gmail isn't very good; other than the massive pain updating the world about your move there isn't much to lose.
JoshMnem 7y ago
Easy solutions: don't store photos and other files in your Google account and/or download old mail by dragging it to a local folder in an email client like Thunderbird.
rekoros 7y ago
I paid. It’s OK - it’s an amazing service that changed my life. Even after paying, I still can’t believe how cheap it is.
braindead_in 7y ago
It is a good thing that Google is charging for it's products. They are converting users from products to customers. I am looking forward to Google Search Pro without any ads.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Removing doubleclick ads is something i'm more interested in. Search ads always seem to be contextual, never personalized. Sadly Google Contributor v1 failed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- Jyaif 7y ago
  https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
maypeacepreva1l 7y ago
I think every business is doing that. Apple with annoying storage full messages which I had to cave in just last month and pay.
nmeofthestate 7y ago
I've hit this recently and have been trying to delete enough stuff to make space - the google drive website is awful for doing this. So bad that I wonder whether it's deliberate. I've got 14.8GB of data on there and can't work out where it is. On my computer, the sync'd Google Drive files come to less than one GB, so it's not that.
- judge2020 7y ago
  It doesn't show folders but clicking the text "14.8 of 15 GB used" or this link[0] will take you to a list of the biggest files, at least in drive. You can also go here[1] to see what services are using the most data. 0: https://drive.google.com/drive/quota https://drive.google.com/drive/quota 1: https://one.google.com/storage https://one.google.com/storage
  - nmeofthestate 7y ago
    Thanks. I came back to add the same info, found by googling, that the storage amount includes other Google services. (my space is mostly taken up by photos + gmail, because I've cleaned out google drive in an attempt to get the usage down, not realising that it wasn't the issue. Looks like I'll be spending hours painstakingly deleting photos and emails...
joshstrange 7y ago
Ahh yes, the random-tweet-that-proves-my-point tactic... You can find a tweet that "proves" your point for literally ANY issue. And, if you can't... just create a fake twitter account and tweet it yourself. Readers aren't even parsing the twitter account name so you don't even need to create a new account for each new tweet you want to cite. There are a lot of reasons to be mad at google, having to pay for storage is not one of them.
RocketSyntax 7y ago
It's like $20 a yr for 100GB! It's an incredible deal.
KoftaBob 7y ago
They're not making us do anything. I'm getting so tired of low effort clickbait garbage like this.
axaxs 7y ago
Does Google offer a way to silo storage? I tried to email my wife last week, and she claims to have never gotten it. Investigating, we noticed she hadn't received an email in days. The culprit? Too many original size photos in Google Photos. It seems completely bizarre to me that taking pictures with incorrect settings can bring your email down. To Google's credit and my relief, in fairness, once space was cleared the missing emails did come in. Glad they didn't just start bouncing things!
readhn 7y ago
Google is one of the most brilliant businesses out there - they got everyone's data for free! now they are making people pay for it too, literally!
porker 7y ago
Can I delete attachments in GMail without deleting the email? Googling gives a few potential ways involving the IMAP interface, but nothing straightforward.
alanbernstein 7y ago
It's difficult to figure out how storage is used in gmail. I downloaded my data and did a little analysis, summarized here: https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png. As of that time, my mailbox was using 17GB (14GB of which are in one long-running thread), and 900MB of that was email reply quotes. Google refuses to provide an option to disable email quotes, which are completely useless in an email thread of all gmail accounts. I want my 900MB of free storage back, dammit! Also, there's no way (AFAIK) to delete images attached to emails, while keeping the messages.
zachruss92 7y ago
I think the article forgets that Google is a business and they have an intrinsic motivation to make money. IMHO Google provides a ton of software at no charge to customers (I know, ads). Moving to a consumption-based pricing model w/ a generous free tier means that only the users who use Google's services the most end up paying for it. Also, $20/yr for 100GB seems like a steal. I use G Suite even for my personal email but even on my longest-standing account with almost a decade of history I am only using 20GBs with the majority of that being photos.
peterwwillis 7y ago
Is there a non-javascript version of this page?
sairamkunala 7y ago
the news site that the article was written on only gives access to 5 free articles per month, its the same thing google has done.
irrational 7y ago
Every time I get near maxing out my drive space, I just take some time to delete everything. If anything is really important I don't keep it in gmail or google docs. That way I can just do a wipe of all my emails and files at any time without worry.
pkamb 7y ago
I began using a secondary Gmail account of mine as the Google Account tied to a free-tier Google Photos upload from my phone. Bad idea. It's a shared pool of storage resources, which was quickly filled up by photos. Leaving Gmail with no storage. I suddenly was not getting any emails to that account, with no notifications. Seemed VERY vindictive to suddenly not deliver 75KB emails because I had stored some photos.
satanspastaroll 7y ago
The article seems to be gated to subscribers only. The filter is applied after the article loads, so it may still be readable without executing javascript E: that seems to only apply when using private mode, for whatever reason.
- brainless 7y ago
  You can use Reader view in Firefox (Ctr + Alt + R on Linux).
- Centaurefox 7y ago
  You can also use outline : https://outline.com/ https://outline.com/
  - samfriedman 7y ago
    Outline has been failing on almost any site I care to read recently. It's become far rarer to find an article that Outline works with, in my experience.
    - eddyg 7y ago
      Worked fine for me? https://outline.com/j453CJ https://outline.com/j453CJ
- trevyn 7y ago
  So the hope is that we pay to read about how Google is making us pay? The end times are truly near; the machine will ouroborosesquely eat itself soon. :-)
esalman 7y ago
Is there a way to delete attachments (but not the associated emails) from Gmail?
- cr3ative 7y ago
  I believe you can do this by configuring an IMAP client and doing it there; then it'll sync the result. Thunderbird, for example, is quite scriptable.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    Their IMAP implementation is terribly broken. It will most likely just create brand new messages and not delete the old ones. It's one of the many reason I moved off gmail (to self hosting) in 2012. Another being domestic spying .. which everyone has forgotten about apparently.
    - jannes 7y ago
      Can you clarify what you mean with domestic spying? Are you concerned about other people in your household having access to your Gmail account?
      - DoctorOW 7y ago
        Domestic spying in this case is referring to the United States spying on its own citizens.
        lucb1e 7y ago
        Which doesn't actually matter if you're in the 96% of people that are not from the USA. This argument "but we don't spy on USA citizens so now we're all good and ethical" doesn't make much sense to me. If a Dutch company allegedly spies on foreign customers, it really wouldn't change my (Dutch) opinion about my privacy at that company.
- ggambetta 7y ago
s_Hogg 7y ago
How easy is it to migrate these days?
- martin_a 7y ago
  Migrations always are somewhat "complicated". But cost-wise, I'm running my own domain with mail and a NextCloud instance for 3,99 € per month. Probably could get all of that even cheaper, but I like that webhoster. I recently switched my Contact from Google to NextCloud/CalDav, too, so I got rid of that tie, too.
linuxdude314 7y ago
Migrating from Google Drive/One is to something like Nextcloud or a personal NAS is very easy. Just install the desktop application, mount your NAS or other cloud provides storage, and use your favorite synchronization tool to sync the data. I’ve done this before with Nextcloud and a QNAP NAS and it couldn’t be easier. I highly recommend taking the governance of your data seriously. If you don’t you may end up losing everything without knowing it.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > Just It's never "just". In the case of email, you've not only got to back it up into a usable form but remove the old ones from gmail in order to get the free space back. And then it's no longer in your gmail interface.
- javagram 7y ago
  Much easier to just pay for the additional storage or G Suite and regularly backup Gmail using offlineimap or Takeout. If you like running the local mail server for fun that’s cool but it’s pretty easy to secure your data from loss while still using google services.
- ta0987 7y ago
  A personal NAS doesn't have the seamless backup of cloud storage. IMO your hardware is much more likely to fail than you are likely to get locked out of your Google account, even if the latter happens to some people. And even if you have backups, now you need to buy new hardware, reinstall, restore, while life is still going on, and during which your data is unavailable. I'd love to not depend on a huge cloud provider but I haven't found a DIY solution that matches the convenience and seamlessness. There are a few rare could sync products that claim client side encryption (SpiderOak, ResilioSync & Tresorit) but they're not fully integrated with Chromebooks, Android and/or iOS. (Right now I'm using a jury-rigged combination of SpiderOak for backup and Resilio Sync for sync, but it's kind of a hack. This is not a compensated endorsement, LOL.)
  - darkwater 7y ago
    OTOH if you get locked out of your BigG account and you don't have a backup elsewhere, you are screwed for good. So, I'd treat HW failures and account closures on the same level. You just have to think about the possibilities in your specific case: which HW are you willing to invest on VS how you are going to behave with your Google account.
Blackstone4 7y ago
The journalist is not clear on where the line is here. From what I can tell, I still have my 15Gb of free storage linked to my Gmail account. It looks like this is linked to storage associated with legacy Chromebook accounts which originally came with 200Gb of free storage and now they have to pay for that data.
NoblePublius 7y ago
Omg 99 cents a month for 50GB I’m outraged
wbobeirne 7y ago
I'm actually really interested to see Google start charging for things instead of the usual cycle of spinning things up and shutting them down when the business model isn't there. I'd much rather pay 100$ a year for their services if it would guarantee their availability, and reduce the pressure to commoditize my data.
- noxToken 7y ago
  Am I going to pay $100/year for the same services and still get ignored when I get locked out of my account? Enterprise users already pay for Google services. It seems like recourse for them is no different than a free tier user (aside from blowing up on Twitter/Reddit/HN). Why would anyone want to pay for that?
  - sct202 7y ago
    It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you, which is completely absurd for a company of their size.
    - godzillabrennus 7y ago
      Knowing people at Google is absolutely the only way to get help with crucial issues. Silly doesn’t begin to describe it.
  - bittercynic 7y ago
    It's been a few years, but the school where I worked used Google Apps for Education, and when I called for support they were always pretty helpful. Has that deteriorated recently?
    - zenexer 7y ago
      They'll be helpful until your whole organization gets shut down for "abuse". What kind of abuse? They won't tell you. No human will talk to you. Microsoft does the exact same thing with O365. Even knowing people at Microsoft and getting tickets internally escalated and re-escalated, it took me far too long to get things unlocked, and I never got an answer on what caused it. A week later, I was locked out again. Same routine. Finally got back in, and a bunch of music that I had legally purchased from 7digital and stored in OneDrive was mysteriously missing. During the whole process, as soon as anyone you talk to sees the state of your account, they'll refuse to continue talking. You have to fill out a generic form, and you don't receive a response. Either your account gets unlocked an indefinite amount of time later, or it doesn't. All the major cloud providers seem to operate that way.
digitalsushi 7y ago
As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant stuff available. I tried to just make a new one and migrate, but there is not a reasonable way I have found to migrate 10 gigabyte email accounts. With their rate limiting, I end up with napkin math suggesting about 30 days to migrate, using someone else's github scripts that do lots of error checking and restarting.
- ValentineC 7y ago
  > As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant stuff available. Aren't you able to upgrade directly to G Suite Basic? (I myself have both domains on legacy free Google Apps, and newer ones on paid G Suite.)
heavymark 7y ago
Glad to hear. Google is known for killing products right and left, Google should charge for products people love and rely on to make sure its 100% sustainable and won't go away.
gandalfian 7y ago
I would feel more sanguine if they let me sort emails by size making it easier to trim the bloat.
- dplgk 7y ago
  ANY sorting would be nice.
- achow 7y ago
  This is so rudimentary.. In old days, when hit by dreaded mailbox size exceeded notification, in Outlook I always used to sort mails by size and remove the attachments - which used to be the only culprit in mailbox bloat. Go through top 10-20 mails, and you are set for another year or so before you hit the mailbox limit again. Rinse and repeat.
- pitzips 7y ago
  It's not ideal, but you can search for 'larger_than:5m' and it will show mail greater than 5mb in size.
- elicash 7y ago
  You can. That's how I manage it. larger:3M smaller:4M (for example).
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  I think you can use a IMAP client like Thunderbird to clean it up. (I say "think" because while I use a gmail account in my email client, I only use it to receive notifications from Google, so no wild folder/tags setup, and I never check the webmail to see if it matches the emails I see in Thunderbird)
  - ahbyb 7y ago
    Yes you can. You can go to the "All Mail" folder, add the "Size" column to the list view (right click the columns) and then proceed to sort every email by size. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns
natvert 7y ago
I love the irony of this: I open the article and start reading. I am told that Google lured us in w/ free storage, but now I'm going have to pay since I've used so much storage. Then, a popup is overlaid on the article and the text is hidden. The popup says this article isn't actually free. I've read too many free articles on Bloomberg and now I'm going to have to pay for a subscription to keep reading. I don't know what to take away from this other than the reminder that every public company has a duty to shareholders to take people's money! That's the function of a company: profit. What do we really expect here?
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  I agree that it's ironic/hypocritical. I disagree strongly that we should simply expect it. Consumer attitude is a real component of capitalism, so it's self-fulfilling to encourage silence under the theory that we can't affect anything.
scumbert 7y ago
Yeah, comrade! Everyone should provide every service for absolutely free!
- vcoelho 7y ago
  How the hell you took the comment above as an apology of communism?
- gamblor956 7y ago
  The irony is that Bloomberg is complaining about Google charging for formerly free stuff while Bloomberg is doing the same thing Google is.
  - notus 7y ago
    I dunno if it is that ironic. Google basically sold people on the idea of their services because they were free whereas Bloomberg never claimed to be free. When was a Bloomberg subscription ever free?
    - wcoenen 7y ago
      > When was a Bloomberg subscription ever free? I don't think anyone is claiming that a full Bloomberg news subscription should be free. He's talking about the practice of popping up a paywall after baiting the reader with a few seconds of reading time and a few free articles. This was introduced around May 2018. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/05/03/bloomberg-goes-behind-paywall-after-success-with-businessweek-subscription-model https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/05/03/bloomberg-goes-behin...
  - scumbert 7y ago
    This thread was detached by rabid mods, but in response to your comment, why is Bloomberg not entitled to charge for their self-produced analysis?
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for a bit better than internet default here, and posts like this make that harder. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334532 and marked it off-topic.
sasasassy 7y ago
One of the complaints, in the article, is not like the others. The people that have been buying Pixel phones, expecting to have unlimited storage, to find out with the latest device Google forces your content to be compressed, do seem to have been tricked. If there's an expectation there, they have the duty to disclose it.
TheAdamist 7y ago
Trying to pay google for anything is a not a good idea, any kind of problem with the payment; your fault or not and they will lock you out of any google services permanently with no support, recourse or escalation.
FpUser 7y ago
I do not use ANY cloud for my business/private accounts. I just host my main and backup servers here and there with providers I can switch to / from in a flick of a finger. The only "cloud" I tolerate is buying stuff from the watching movies on Netflix and shopping on Amazon and likes. Of course when consulting and client demands it I work with the Azure/Github/etc but that is the extent of my involvement. Anything that happens on that front becomes a client problem. Not mine.

167 points by premk 7y ago

I was noticing just the other day that my Gmail storage is creeping upward towards its limit. I'm sure it could stand some cleaning out although I'm not sure how much that will affect the storage used. It's also harder if you've been in the Apple ecosystem for a while with getting off with the free tier of storage. I suspect a lot of us are going to end up paying various subscription fees for storage on a number of services we use.

kyrra 7y ago
https://www.google.com/settings/storage https://www.google.com/settings/storage can be at least a little helpful to see storage usage across Google's main properties.
- ghaff 7y ago
  That was actually quite useful. I apparently have 4GB of pics on Google Photo that I didn't know about or use.
jvagner 7y ago
I was surprised at how difficult it was to make "Delete" a top-level, default UI option even in the latest iOS version of Mail. It seemed interesting and novel when Gmail first launched and they encouraged archiving everything, but all these years later, mail clients are still engineered around this notion, even when they're not Gmail-only mail clients. I like to delete emails, and for me, on iOS, that means I tend to use either Outlook or Spark (between iPhone and iPad), or.. ironically, Gmail for iOS, which allows for a one-swipe-action committed delete.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I've gotten pretty lazy about deleting emails. But, the space aside, GBs of random stuff do make it harder to search for older emails and docs, especially if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for.
- jchw 7y ago
  The opposite problem also exists: I am a bit frustrated trying to archive mail in Yandex Mail on iOS, which actually pushes you to delete and hides archive behind a couple layers. Not sure why, to be honest.
GistNoesis 7y ago
What I usually do is search mails according to specific criterion, put a label on all of them so that they are easily downloadable from https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout (you can sub-select only the specified label there) Then a few hours later I receive the download link and download them. Then search for the label and delete them all to release the space. Don't use the existing archive functionality, because you won't be able to delete them all ; by doing a "in:archive" search the div which propose to really select them all won't pop-up (feature or dark-pattern I don't know).
digitalsushi 7y ago
I did too, and so I tried to find a way to back my gmail up. With their rate limiting, I'm not convinced my gmail is something I can actually retrieve. It's 2/3 full and too heavy to pick up, the handles break off. And with 200k emails from 1999 (I think I have emails before gmail in there), I'm in trouble.

bpodgursky 7y ago

It will be healthy for both Google and the internet at large for Google to have a revenue stream diversified from advertising. If consumers feel that it is normal to pay small amounts of money for useful web-based services, Google and other sites will have better and more transparent opportunities to monetize.

ShteiLoups 7y ago
So long as they don't continue to sell my data while also taking my money, peace.

hastes 7y ago

I would be more than happy to pay for gmail, google docs, and an entire suite of google products with the absolute guarantee legally that they could not and would not either collect, or sell my information as part of that payment. I highly doubt that would ever happen though, considering data is the new oil. Oh well, one can dream.

nostromo 7y ago
That exists. Sign up for GSuite for a single seat.
- thekingshorses 7y ago
  How much does it cost?
  - klodolph 7y ago
    $6/month per user. I switched from an email server I personally managed (exim+dovecot) to GSuite a couple years ago.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    $12/mo for 1 TB of storage: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html If storage isn't a concern (just privacy), $6/mo for 30 GB (double what Gmail gives you for free).
    - dimensi0nal 7y ago
      The $12 plan is unlimited; the 1 TB limit isn't enforced.
      - judge2020 7y ago
        Do you have a source or have other info on this? I have a G Suite Non-Profit account and while it says the "my drive" had 30 GB of storage, the non-profit license also grants us "shared drives" which grant unlimited storage but only in those shared drives. I was wondering if the 1 TB limit is a similar situation. As a side-note, Drive File Stream messes up uploading big files/folders due to this: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en

xiphias2 7y ago

I'm happy to pay to Google, but I would be happy if in return it would stop mining my emails. Still, I know that it's too much to ask for.

thesandlord 7y ago
Gmail stopped reading emails a while back: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
- zajd 7y ago
  "to show you ads", what exactly that means is beyond me. They obviously scan your emails, as there are a ton of features that require it, things like recognizing when a flight is upcoming, etc. If you trust them not to use that for advertising I have some valuable beachfront real estate to sell you. Remember Twitter/FB's 'oops, we were accidentally using the recovery number incorrectly', Google essentially just leaves that door open via the language used in this answer. Without a definition of "for advertising" it's just meaningless.
- rurp 7y ago
  "Google does not read your emails for the purpose of directly targeting ads" is a wildly different and much more accurate statement than "Gmail stopped reading your emails".
mattzito 7y ago
Google does not mine your emails. https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/ensuring-your-security-and-privacy-within-gmail/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/ensuring-... Disclosure: I work for google on G Suite, but not on Gmail.
- mfer 7y ago
  > We do not process email content to serve ads This says nothing about email metadata being used in relation to ads or for uses of content unrelated to ads (e.g., generation of search results). If I hadn't seen the leaked selfish ledger video [1] I would not look for these nuances in the language. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

The problem with Gmail is that it lacks basic cleanup tools such as sorting by size and you are forced to waste your time with tricks like larger:20mb.

ahnick 7y ago
Had no idea you could do that. Thanks!
stvswn 7y ago
what's hard about that? When you are approaching your limit they give you a warning and link to this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6374270?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6374270?hl=en
ssully 7y ago
The bigger problem with GMail is that the mobile app has no controls to manage large amount of emails - not even a basic 'select all'. Which is hilarious, because Inbox was so good because it was easy to manage most of your email on your phone. Now my Gmail is overflowing because it's too difficult to archive thing I want, or delete what I don't in bulk. I actually have to log into the web interface to do any kind of clean up, which is something I never had to do with Inbox.
- ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  It is possible to select more emails than are displayed; however operations such as deletion on large selections always fail.
anoncake 7y ago
Just use a proper desktop client. Gmail's IMAP implementation was pretty non-standard last time I checked but it should be good enough for this.

im3w1l 7y ago

Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into monetization mode? A sign of slowing growth and increased payout to shareholders to come?

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into monetization mode? No, that happened when they started selling ads.

cocoa19 7y ago

It would be nice to take your email address to another provider, the same way it happens for cellphone numbers. This could be email 2.0... First rule: 1)Do not require host name in the field name. johndoe@gmail.com becomes johndoe.

me_me_me 7y ago
So who owns the username? Who runs the domain? The beauty of email as protocol is that its independent. Nothing is stopping you from running you @cocoa19.com (given its non-occupied already).
- cocoa19 7y ago
  Who owns the telephone number? Same concept. If I don't want Google to run my email, I just switch providers, let's say protonmail or fastmail, etc. But I don't have to give a new address to all my acquaintances.
  - me_me_me 7y ago
    Government owns the prefix that is rented to businesses who wants to start their phone company (well at least in Europe). Also the prefix in the phone number is exactly like a domain. Even if there were no prefixes, one way or another you need a governing body that ensures no clashes occur and has power to decide on disputes. So no two companies try to assign same number to two different customers.
PureParadigm 7y ago
You can buy your own domain. Then when you switch email providers you'd just change your domain's mail records to point to the new provider. You can even transfer your domain between registrars if you decide you don't like your current one.

ipsi 7y ago

Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3, for example, or about what you'd pay for S3 glacier storage, not including transfer costs. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is about the same price as iCloud, but also charges for downloads. Since Backblaze is profitable (as far as I know?), presumably Apple are making money off iCloud storage, but I'm still not sure if I'd use the word "lucrative" here.

gruez 7y ago
>Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3 ...assuming you use exactly that much. If you use something like 250GB, it's twice the price as s3. If you check the offerings[1], there's a gap in the 200GB-2TB range. I suspect that's to force "average users" (in the 200GB-1TB range) into paying more than they need, while giving the appearance of being competitive (if you use all 2TB, which most won't). [1] 50GB: $0.99 200GB: $2.99 2TB: $9.99
- shantly 7y ago
  The funny thing about consumer cloud storage is it's only useful if you aren't using all of it. Stuff just automatically showing up there is the point. If it's full, that doesn't happen.

wccrawford 7y ago

When GMail started, they claimed that I'd never need to delete emails and I could always just archive them. I knew that claim was too good to be true, but I figured it'd be a long time before I really needed to worry about it. Drive now exists and takes up more of that space, but I'm still comfortably away from my limits. I'm not upset about eventually having to pay for storage, but I was and am upset about their claim that it would never be necessary.

thrill 7y ago
All promises of perpetuity have sell by dates.
decasteve 7y ago
This has become the pattern. Buying into something on the basis of a value proposition only to have it consistently changed from under you without any recourse. It's a bait-and-switch and that's why it's upsetting. It's perfectly reasonable to charge for these services and what they are suggesting to charge -- if I were still a Google customer. But that's not how it was sold to everyone. How many competitors did they drive out by taking this approach and undercutting this way for so long?
- psanford 7y ago
  There's no bait-and-switch going on here! They've always been perfectly clear in how much storage you get for free. They've never reduced that amount, they have only increased it over time.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That's unfair with respect to email. I've had large corporate email environments in my portfolio for about half of my career. As recently as 2017, ~2-3% of a 200k org of those users would exceed the free GMail tier in terms of storage. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I'd put money on 80% of the userbase being less than 10GB. Big email users are always using email as a filing system. Calling GMail bait-and-switch based on marketing claims made in a 2005 context is a pretty extreme stance. My team at a big enteprise org provided folks with 50-100MB (similar to pre-GMail online offerings) in 2005. Then Google offered a seemingly limitless service that is to this day practically unlimited for all but the most active user.

linsomniac 7y ago

This article seems awfully doom and gloom. I find that: - Google provides really good tools for archiving your data. If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, archive it somewhere else, and then clean up items you no longer want. I recently did this with my photos, I knew I had some huge videos that had been uploaded that I didn't need (I had edited them into a Youtube video), so I was able to find and delete them and open up quite a bit of space. I toyed with the idea of deleting photos 5 years old, once I archived them, but I didn't need to because of the above. - Google provides a lot of value to me for the $3/month I've been spending. Photo enrichment and searching is something I use all the time. Storage of my documents and files is very useful and google has been super reliable.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
> If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, This is what I'm doing to migrate my data over to Microsoft's offering (I get adfree mail and 1TB + office products that work offline). I'm just waiting for Microsoft to let me use a domain without GoDaddy, so I can use the email, but I'm more likely to use it for storage.
gorgoiler 7y ago
Hah. Takeout is neat, but it doesn’t seem to include any of the ad tracking data google have on me. Emails, videos, files: yes. URLs I’ve been tracked to that influence which ads I’m served: nope. I recently found it easier to find an old music video I’d made by using takeout to download my YouTube archive, rather than figuring out which sub identity of which linked account I had used to upload the private video.
- knorker 7y ago
  Presumably that's because that's not your data. I mean nothing good or bad about that. But why would you expect to be able to download data that's not yours?
jfoster 7y ago
Exactly! Suppose you live for another 100 years. At the current rate, Google will be giving you the rest of your life with this for $300. You should just be hoping it remains this cheap.

kilo_bravo_3 7y ago

I'm an idiot. Like, hardcore. This morning I made breakfast and left for work without eating it. Even I came to the realization that if you don't pay for something you are a disposable, interchangeable asset to be exploited. $4.25 per month gets me 25GB at Fastmail. $1.08 per month gets me a domain name at Namecheap. $5.33 per month gets me an email address with no ads and no tracking, support when things go wrong, and an email address that is my actual name at a .com address that sounds respectable. If fastmail goes bad? All of my emails are on my computer. I just switch providers and I can keep the same address. If namecheap goes bad? I move my domain name to another service. There are step-by-step easy-to-follow tutorials on how to do what I did that are so simple to implement that even someone who left their bowl of oatmeal on the kitchen counter this morning and is really hungry at work could follow them. If something isn't worth spending $5.33 per month on, is it really that important? I don't pay for HN. If they started screwing with their users, or started charging for the service I would move on and certainly wouldn't write articles claiming that YC hooked me then hung me out to dry for cash.

NicoJuicy 7y ago
Custom domains aren't secure though, it's probably the most vulnerable and easiest point of attack
- chenster 7y ago
  What is that?
  - gruez 7y ago
    Usually social engineering the domain registrar into transferring the domain.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
      You can lock it though.

mfer 7y ago

There are many ways to look at this... 1. It is great that Google is working to come up income sources other than ads. This will help diversify their business and motives over time. 2. This may cause some to think that the money is the only method of payment for the service that's happening. That payment via our data isn't happening because money is involved. I hope this does not happen. 3. It opens the door for competitors who want to charge for a service. If Google can charge this gives some emotional motivation for others to do it instead of harvesting and selling data. It's a tiny thing and a bit part but still a thing. 4. This is telling that Google isn't making enough money on this data to justify storing more of it. What does this say about enough for them? How much data do people want to store and what would it mean? I'll stop at 4 things. I hope people wonder down these different paths that are not mutually exclusive.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Given that search data is not very valuable after 3 months I suppose the other data is less valuable after the same time. This may prompt some users to help google out by deleting their old less valuable data when they get near their limits, or if not they may help Google out with some money for storing old data that otherwise is not valuable for Google.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

From the article: > “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one person tweeted in September. Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory. I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all these tweets to back it up!

pacala 7y ago
Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian: they can craft any narrative by choosing which tweets to show in your timeline. The ultimate out-of-context quoting machine. 140 character limits was set in place for a reason.
- dominotw 7y ago
  > Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian not sure if gp's point has anything to do with twitter itself or character limits.
  - pacala 7y ago
    gp is complaining about third parties quoting tweets out of context. When Twitter's raison d'être is out of context quoting. He saw trees, I'm glad to point at the whole forest.
    - V-eHGsd_ 7y ago
      gp wasn't talking about tweets being taken out of context. they were talking about reporters using an entire tweet from a random person to support a random theory.
      - pacala 7y ago

ineedasername 7y ago

I've found their prices very reasonable and worth the cost for roughly 50GB in business and family related photos, with a healthy margin left for growth in storage needs.

pbreit 7y ago

When did Gmail's ever-increasing storage allotment thing end?

illnewsthat 7y ago
From the article "It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped."

mkr-hn 7y ago

Short version: Google is offering paid plans for people who exceed the ample free 15GB of storage. There is so much to criticize Google for, but asking for money in exchange for a service is not one of them.

sct202 7y ago
Yeah weren't people complaining about how they've been suffocating a lot of industries (like mapping, email) by offering so much for free subsidized by search ads.
- mkr-hn 7y ago
  There seem to be three broad generations--by adoption, weakly correlated with age--of internet-savvy people. 1: People who were very active in the BBS/Usenet days and saw the emergence of the public Internet and web. 2: People (like me) who mainly got on when the .com bubble was warming up. People in 1 and 2 saw or even had these complaints, and had plenty of skepticism about ad driven models when they emerged with the growing realization at Google and other surviving web companies that ads and data mining could save them after the crash. 3: People who only know the internet after that. Who never knew a time when the internet was such a big, new thing that people still capitalized the word. I think most of the people who complain about companies charging for stuff are in 3 and never knew what we lost when ad-funded silos pushed everything else out. It doesn't help that a lot of them are, along with 2 and even 1, struggling to make enough money to survive with so many jobs turned into SaaS or taken over by big outsourcing firms that don't need as many people.

magnetic 7y ago

I've been pretty happy with the following setup: I have a domain at namecheap, which forwards my address (say foo@bar.com) to my gmail account. I use fetchmail from my home computer to bring the gmail content to my local mail server (dovecot), which serves it out to me via imaps. That means there is usually very little sitting in gmail, and it can accumulate there for a while when I have to do maintenance on my home OpenBSD server (which is quite rare and doesn't last very long generally). That means I can keep my email address "forever" (it'll always stay foo@bar.com) but I can switch out of gmail anytime I want, as long as the provider I switch to allows POP. It also means I can take advantage of the spam filtering provided by gmail. I also take advantage of the "advanced parsing" they perform on my mail, but my default assumption is that anybody in the chain will be doing it anyways, so I have no illusions that switching out of gmail will help prevent any data mining.

6d6b73 7y ago

The problem here is not that Google started charging people for their services The problem here is not the question if Gmail is good or not. The problem is that they subsidized their Gmail and other services in order to get rid of small competitors and once they have a large market share, they will make most of their services paid. It will take time, it will be slow but it's going to happen. And they use their large market share to keep all of the small independent mail providers and self-hosted email servers in check by marking their emails as spam.

svachalek 7y ago
Yeah, this is basic capitalism but pretty scummy nonetheless. Having an email address for a decade makes it incredibly difficult to change. The one "bright" spot is actually that Gmail isn't very good; other than the massive pain updating the world about your move there isn't much to lose.

JoshMnem 7y ago

Easy solutions: don't store photos and other files in your Google account and/or download old mail by dragging it to a local folder in an email client like Thunderbird.

rekoros 7y ago

I paid. It’s OK - it’s an amazing service that changed my life. Even after paying, I still can’t believe how cheap it is.

braindead_in 7y ago

It is a good thing that Google is charging for it's products. They are converting users from products to customers. I am looking forward to Google Search Pro without any ads.

judge2020 7y ago
Removing doubleclick ads is something i'm more interested in. Search ads always seem to be contextual, never personalized. Sadly Google Contributor v1 failed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
Jyaif 7y ago
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

maypeacepreva1l 7y ago

I think every business is doing that. Apple with annoying storage full messages which I had to cave in just last month and pay.

nmeofthestate 7y ago

I've hit this recently and have been trying to delete enough stuff to make space - the google drive website is awful for doing this. So bad that I wonder whether it's deliberate. I've got 14.8GB of data on there and can't work out where it is. On my computer, the sync'd Google Drive files come to less than one GB, so it's not that.

judge2020 7y ago
It doesn't show folders but clicking the text "14.8 of 15 GB used" or this link[0] will take you to a list of the biggest files, at least in drive. You can also go here[1] to see what services are using the most data. 0: https://drive.google.com/drive/quota https://drive.google.com/drive/quota 1: https://one.google.com/storage https://one.google.com/storage
- nmeofthestate 7y ago
  Thanks. I came back to add the same info, found by googling, that the storage amount includes other Google services. (my space is mostly taken up by photos + gmail, because I've cleaned out google drive in an attempt to get the usage down, not realising that it wasn't the issue. Looks like I'll be spending hours painstakingly deleting photos and emails...

joshstrange 7y ago

Ahh yes, the random-tweet-that-proves-my-point tactic... You can find a tweet that "proves" your point for literally ANY issue. And, if you can't... just create a fake twitter account and tweet it yourself. Readers aren't even parsing the twitter account name so you don't even need to create a new account for each new tweet you want to cite. There are a lot of reasons to be mad at google, having to pay for storage is not one of them.

RocketSyntax 7y ago

It's like $20 a yr for 100GB! It's an incredible deal.

KoftaBob 7y ago

They're not making us do anything. I'm getting so tired of low effort clickbait garbage like this.

axaxs 7y ago

Does Google offer a way to silo storage? I tried to email my wife last week, and she claims to have never gotten it. Investigating, we noticed she hadn't received an email in days. The culprit? Too many original size photos in Google Photos. It seems completely bizarre to me that taking pictures with incorrect settings can bring your email down. To Google's credit and my relief, in fairness, once space was cleared the missing emails did come in. Glad they didn't just start bouncing things!

readhn 7y ago

Google is one of the most brilliant businesses out there - they got everyone's data for free! now they are making people pay for it too, literally!

porker 7y ago

Can I delete attachments in GMail without deleting the email? Googling gives a few potential ways involving the IMAP interface, but nothing straightforward.

alanbernstein 7y ago

It's difficult to figure out how storage is used in gmail. I downloaded my data and did a little analysis, summarized here: https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png. As of that time, my mailbox was using 17GB (14GB of which are in one long-running thread), and 900MB of that was email reply quotes. Google refuses to provide an option to disable email quotes, which are completely useless in an email thread of all gmail accounts. I want my 900MB of free storage back, dammit! Also, there's no way (AFAIK) to delete images attached to emails, while keeping the messages.

zachruss92 7y ago

I think the article forgets that Google is a business and they have an intrinsic motivation to make money. IMHO Google provides a ton of software at no charge to customers (I know, ads). Moving to a consumption-based pricing model w/ a generous free tier means that only the users who use Google's services the most end up paying for it. Also, $20/yr for 100GB seems like a steal. I use G Suite even for my personal email but even on my longest-standing account with almost a decade of history I am only using 20GBs with the majority of that being photos.

peterwwillis 7y ago

Is there a non-javascript version of this page?

sairamkunala 7y ago

the news site that the article was written on only gives access to 5 free articles per month, its the same thing google has done.

irrational 7y ago

Every time I get near maxing out my drive space, I just take some time to delete everything. If anything is really important I don't keep it in gmail or google docs. That way I can just do a wipe of all my emails and files at any time without worry.

pkamb 7y ago

I began using a secondary Gmail account of mine as the Google Account tied to a free-tier Google Photos upload from my phone. Bad idea. It's a shared pool of storage resources, which was quickly filled up by photos. Leaving Gmail with no storage. I suddenly was not getting any emails to that account, with no notifications. Seemed VERY vindictive to suddenly not deliver 75KB emails because I had stored some photos.

satanspastaroll 7y ago

The article seems to be gated to subscribers only. The filter is applied after the article loads, so it may still be readable without executing javascript E: that seems to only apply when using private mode, for whatever reason.

brainless 7y ago
You can use Reader view in Firefox (Ctr + Alt + R on Linux).
Centaurefox 7y ago
You can also use outline : https://outline.com/ https://outline.com/
- samfriedman 7y ago
  Outline has been failing on almost any site I care to read recently. It's become far rarer to find an article that Outline works with, in my experience.
  - eddyg 7y ago
    Worked fine for me? https://outline.com/j453CJ https://outline.com/j453CJ
trevyn 7y ago
So the hope is that we pay to read about how Google is making us pay? The end times are truly near; the machine will ouroborosesquely eat itself soon. :-)

esalman 7y ago

Is there a way to delete attachments (but not the associated emails) from Gmail?

cr3ative 7y ago
I believe you can do this by configuring an IMAP client and doing it there; then it'll sync the result. Thunderbird, for example, is quite scriptable.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Their IMAP implementation is terribly broken. It will most likely just create brand new messages and not delete the old ones. It's one of the many reason I moved off gmail (to self hosting) in 2012. Another being domestic spying .. which everyone has forgotten about apparently.
  - jannes 7y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean with domestic spying? Are you concerned about other people in your household having access to your Gmail account?
    - DoctorOW 7y ago
      Domestic spying in this case is referring to the United States spying on its own citizens.
      - lucb1e 7y ago
        Which doesn't actually matter if you're in the 96% of people that are not from the USA. This argument "but we don't spy on USA citizens so now we're all good and ethical" doesn't make much sense to me. If a Dutch company allegedly spies on foreign customers, it really wouldn't change my (Dutch) opinion about my privacy at that company.
ggambetta 7y ago

s_Hogg 7y ago

How easy is it to migrate these days?

martin_a 7y ago
Migrations always are somewhat "complicated". But cost-wise, I'm running my own domain with mail and a NextCloud instance for 3,99 € per month. Probably could get all of that even cheaper, but I like that webhoster. I recently switched my Contact from Google to NextCloud/CalDav, too, so I got rid of that tie, too.

linuxdude314 7y ago

Migrating from Google Drive/One is to something like Nextcloud or a personal NAS is very easy. Just install the desktop application, mount your NAS or other cloud provides storage, and use your favorite synchronization tool to sync the data. I’ve done this before with Nextcloud and a QNAP NAS and it couldn’t be easier. I highly recommend taking the governance of your data seriously. If you don’t you may end up losing everything without knowing it.

pjc50 7y ago
> Just It's never "just". In the case of email, you've not only got to back it up into a usable form but remove the old ones from gmail in order to get the free space back. And then it's no longer in your gmail interface.
javagram 7y ago
Much easier to just pay for the additional storage or G Suite and regularly backup Gmail using offlineimap or Takeout. If you like running the local mail server for fun that’s cool but it’s pretty easy to secure your data from loss while still using google services.
ta0987 7y ago
A personal NAS doesn't have the seamless backup of cloud storage. IMO your hardware is much more likely to fail than you are likely to get locked out of your Google account, even if the latter happens to some people. And even if you have backups, now you need to buy new hardware, reinstall, restore, while life is still going on, and during which your data is unavailable. I'd love to not depend on a huge cloud provider but I haven't found a DIY solution that matches the convenience and seamlessness. There are a few rare could sync products that claim client side encryption (SpiderOak, ResilioSync & Tresorit) but they're not fully integrated with Chromebooks, Android and/or iOS. (Right now I'm using a jury-rigged combination of SpiderOak for backup and Resilio Sync for sync, but it's kind of a hack. This is not a compensated endorsement, LOL.)
- darkwater 7y ago
  OTOH if you get locked out of your BigG account and you don't have a backup elsewhere, you are screwed for good. So, I'd treat HW failures and account closures on the same level. You just have to think about the possibilities in your specific case: which HW are you willing to invest on VS how you are going to behave with your Google account.

Blackstone4 7y ago

The journalist is not clear on where the line is here. From what I can tell, I still have my 15Gb of free storage linked to my Gmail account. It looks like this is linked to storage associated with legacy Chromebook accounts which originally came with 200Gb of free storage and now they have to pay for that data.

NoblePublius 7y ago

Omg 99 cents a month for 50GB I’m outraged

wbobeirne 7y ago

I'm actually really interested to see Google start charging for things instead of the usual cycle of spinning things up and shutting them down when the business model isn't there. I'd much rather pay 100$ a year for their services if it would guarantee their availability, and reduce the pressure to commoditize my data.

noxToken 7y ago
Am I going to pay $100/year for the same services and still get ignored when I get locked out of my account? Enterprise users already pay for Google services. It seems like recourse for them is no different than a free tier user (aside from blowing up on Twitter/Reddit/HN). Why would anyone want to pay for that?
- sct202 7y ago
  It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you, which is completely absurd for a company of their size.
  - godzillabrennus 7y ago
    Knowing people at Google is absolutely the only way to get help with crucial issues. Silly doesn’t begin to describe it.
- bittercynic 7y ago
  It's been a few years, but the school where I worked used Google Apps for Education, and when I called for support they were always pretty helpful. Has that deteriorated recently?
  - zenexer 7y ago
    They'll be helpful until your whole organization gets shut down for "abuse". What kind of abuse? They won't tell you. No human will talk to you. Microsoft does the exact same thing with O365. Even knowing people at Microsoft and getting tickets internally escalated and re-escalated, it took me far too long to get things unlocked, and I never got an answer on what caused it. A week later, I was locked out again. Same routine. Finally got back in, and a bunch of music that I had legally purchased from 7digital and stored in OneDrive was mysteriously missing. During the whole process, as soon as anyone you talk to sees the state of your account, they'll refuse to continue talking. You have to fill out a generic form, and you don't receive a response. Either your account gets unlocked an indefinite amount of time later, or it doesn't. All the major cloud providers seem to operate that way.

digitalsushi 7y ago

As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant stuff available. I tried to just make a new one and migrate, but there is not a reasonable way I have found to migrate 10 gigabyte email accounts. With their rate limiting, I end up with napkin math suggesting about 30 days to migrate, using someone else's github scripts that do lots of error checking and restarting.

ValentineC 7y ago
> As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant stuff available. Aren't you able to upgrade directly to G Suite Basic? (I myself have both domains on legacy free Google Apps, and newer ones on paid G Suite.)

heavymark 7y ago

Glad to hear. Google is known for killing products right and left, Google should charge for products people love and rely on to make sure its 100% sustainable and won't go away.

gandalfian 7y ago

I would feel more sanguine if they let me sort emails by size making it easier to trim the bloat.

dplgk 7y ago
ANY sorting would be nice.
achow 7y ago
This is so rudimentary.. In old days, when hit by dreaded mailbox size exceeded notification, in Outlook I always used to sort mails by size and remove the attachments - which used to be the only culprit in mailbox bloat. Go through top 10-20 mails, and you are set for another year or so before you hit the mailbox limit again. Rinse and repeat.
pitzips 7y ago
It's not ideal, but you can search for 'larger_than:5m' and it will show mail greater than 5mb in size.
elicash 7y ago
You can. That's how I manage it. larger:3M smaller:4M (for example).
PavlovsCat 7y ago
I think you can use a IMAP client like Thunderbird to clean it up. (I say "think" because while I use a gmail account in my email client, I only use it to receive notifications from Google, so no wild folder/tags setup, and I never check the webmail to see if it matches the emails I see in Thunderbird)
- ahbyb 7y ago
  Yes you can. You can go to the "All Mail" folder, add the "Size" column to the list view (right click the columns) and then proceed to sort every email by size. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-list-columns

natvert 7y ago

I love the irony of this: I open the article and start reading. I am told that Google lured us in w/ free storage, but now I'm going have to pay since I've used so much storage. Then, a popup is overlaid on the article and the text is hidden. The popup says this article isn't actually free. I've read too many free articles on Bloomberg and now I'm going to have to pay for a subscription to keep reading. I don't know what to take away from this other than the reminder that every public company has a duty to shareholders to take people's money! That's the function of a company: profit. What do we really expect here?

happytoexplain 7y ago
I agree that it's ironic/hypocritical. I disagree strongly that we should simply expect it. Consumer attitude is a real component of capitalism, so it's self-fulfilling to encourage silence under the theory that we can't affect anything.

scumbert 7y ago

Yeah, comrade! Everyone should provide every service for absolutely free!

vcoelho 7y ago
How the hell you took the comment above as an apology of communism?
gamblor956 7y ago
The irony is that Bloomberg is complaining about Google charging for formerly free stuff while Bloomberg is doing the same thing Google is.
- notus 7y ago
  I dunno if it is that ironic. Google basically sold people on the idea of their services because they were free whereas Bloomberg never claimed to be free. When was a Bloomberg subscription ever free?
  - wcoenen 7y ago
    > When was a Bloomberg subscription ever free? I don't think anyone is claiming that a full Bloomberg news subscription should be free. He's talking about the practice of popping up a paywall after baiting the reader with a few seconds of reading time and a few free articles. This was introduced around May 2018. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/05/03/bloomberg-goes-behind-paywall-after-success-with-businessweek-subscription-model https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/05/03/bloomberg-goes-behin...
- scumbert 7y ago
  This thread was detached by rabid mods, but in response to your comment, why is Bloomberg not entitled to charge for their self-produced analysis?
dang 7y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for a bit better than internet default here, and posts like this make that harder. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21334532 and marked it off-topic.

sasasassy 7y ago

One of the complaints, in the article, is not like the others. The people that have been buying Pixel phones, expecting to have unlimited storage, to find out with the latest device Google forces your content to be compressed, do seem to have been tricked. If there's an expectation there, they have the duty to disclose it.

TheAdamist 7y ago

Trying to pay google for anything is a not a good idea, any kind of problem with the payment; your fault or not and they will lock you out of any google services permanently with no support, recourse or escalation.

FpUser 7y ago

I do not use ANY cloud for my business/private accounts. I just host my main and backup servers here and there with providers I can switch to / from in a flick of a finger. The only "cloud" I tolerate is buying stuff from the watching movies on Netflix and shopping on Amazon and likes. Of course when consulting and client demands it I work with the Azure/Github/etc but that is the extent of my involvement. Anything that happens on that front becomes a client problem. Not mine.